Some Girls

The only thing about Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 that didn't leave me feeling ripped off were the out-of-left-field cameos by Agnostic Front and Murphy's Law playing to a mosh pit of Masonic punks. Barney stripped and chopped the songs, separating out each instrumental track--a thudding bass line, a snare hit, a guitar feeding back--and leaping from one to another every few frames, roughly sketching the NYHC aesthetic in just a second or two. Some Girls work in snippets like that too, but where Barney hung his samples like minimalist art, the boys in the Girls compact them into dense, furious songs and tear through them like meth freaks. Though the hype sticker on the band's new Heaven's Pregnant Teens (Epitaph) puts bassist Justin Pearson's day job in the Locust front and center, Some Girls don't share much with that grindcore/art-rock/merchandising juggernaut besides a desire to, in the words of drummer Sal Gallegos, "have each song punch people in the face and not let up until they were choking on their own blood." Instead of abstract, noisy, and inhuman, Some Girls are almost orthodox: the little bits flying by still register as old-school hardcore, and sometimes you can actually understand the words. Some Girls even use short song titles--nothing against genius Locust nonsense like "The Half-Eaten Sausage Would Like to See You in His Office," but there's something extra brutal about the haikulike simplicity of "Hot Piss." Tower of Rome and Get Rad open. Thu 2/9, 6 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, 773-281-4444, $10. All ages.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Chris Woo.